Does Irritation Induced by Charitable Direct Mailings Reduce Donations?

Charities mainly rely on direct mailings to attract the attention of potential donators. Individuals may feel irritated by these mailings, in particular when they receive many mailings. We study the consequences of perceived irritation on stated behavior and on actual behavior. Target selection by charities likely results in good donators receiving many mailings and hence they might also be most irritated. Therefore, irritation with direct mailings might be endogenously determined. To create exogenous variation in irritation, we design a unique controlled field experiment in cooperation with five of the largest charities in the Netherlands. Our analysis reveals that direct mailings do result in irritation, but surprisingly this affects neither stated nor actual donating behavior.direct marketing;field experiment;charity donations;irritation

Does Irritation Induced by Charitable Direct Mailings Reduce Donations?

Charities mainly rely on direct mailings to attract the attention of potential donators. Individuals may feel irritated by these mailings, in particular when they receive many mailings. We study the consequences of perceived irritation on stated behavior and on actual behavior. Target selection by charities likely results in good donators receiving many mailings and hence they might also be most irritated. Therefore, irritation with direct mailings might be endogenously determined. To create exogenous variation in irritation, we design a unique controlled field experiment in cooperation with five of the largest charities in the Netherlands. Our analysis reveals that direct mailings do result in irritation, but surprisingly this affects neither stated nor actual donating behavior

Intensity of Precision Agriculture Technology Adoption by Cotton Producers

Many studies on the adoption of precision technologies have generally used logit models to explain the adoption behavior of individuals. This study investigates factors affecting the intensity of precision agriculture technologies adopted by cotton farmers. Particular attention is given to the role of spatial yield variability on the number of precision farming technologies adopted, using a count data estimation procedure and farm-level data. Results indicate that farmers with more within-field yield variability adopted a higher number of precision agriculture technologies. Younger and better educated producers and the number of precision agriculture technologies used were significantly correlated. Finally, farmers using computers for management decisions also adopted a higher number of precision agriculture technologies.precision technologies, Poisson, negative binomial count data method, GPS, education, cotton, Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management, Production Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Constructing learning models from data : the dynamic catalog mailing problem

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-107).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.The catalog industry is a large and important industry in the US economy. One of the most important and challenging business decisions in the industry is to decide who should receive catalogs, due to the significant mailing cost and the low response rate. The problem is a dynamic one - when a customer is ready to purchase, s/he may order from a previous catalog if s/he does not have the most recent one. In this sense, customers' purchasing behavior depends not only on the firm's most recent mailing decision, but also on prior mailing decisions. From the firm's perspective, in order to maximize its long-term profit it should make a series of optimal mailing decisions to each customer over time. Contrary to the traditional myopic catalog mailing decision process that is generally implemented in the catalog industry, we propose a model that allows firms to design optimal dynamic mailing policies using their own business data. We constructed the model from a large data set provided by a catalog mailing company. The computational results from the historical data show great potential profit improvement. This application differs from many other applications of (approximate) dynamic programming in that an underlying Markov model is not a priori available, nor can it be derived in a principled manner. Instead, it has to be estimated or "learned" from available data. The thesis furthers the discussion on issues related to constructing learning models from data. More specifically, we discuss the so called "endogeneity problem" and the effects of inaccuracy in model parameter estimation. The fact that the model parameter estimation depends on data collected according to a specific policy introduces an endogeneity problem. As a result, the derived optimal policy depends on the original policy used to collect the data.(cont.) In the thesis we discuss a specific endogeneity problem, "attribution error." We also investigate whether online learning can solve this problem. More specifically, we discuss the existence of fixed point policies for potential on-line learning algorithms. Imprecision in model parameter estimation also creates the potential for bias. We illustrate this problem and offer a method for detecting it. Finally, we report preliminary results from a large scale field test that tests the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a real business decision setting.by Peng Sun.Ph.D

How the Internet Lowers Prices: Evidence from Matched Survey and Auto Transaction Data

There is convincing evidence that the Internet has lowered the prices paid by some consumers in established industries, for example, term life insurance and car retailing. However, current research does not reveal much about how using the Internet lowers prices. This paper answers this question for the auto retailing industry. We use direct measures of search behavior and consumer characteristics to investigate how the Internet affects negotiated prices. We show that the Internet lowers prices for two distinct reasons. First, the Internet helps consumers learn the invoice price of dealers. Second, the referral process of online buying services, a novel institution made possible by the Internet, also helps consumers obtain lower prices. The combined information and referral price effects are -1.5%, corresponding to 22% of dealers' average gross profit margin per vehicle. We also find that buyers with a high disutility of bargaining benefit from information on the specific car they eventually purchased while buyers who like the bargaining process do not. The results suggest that the decisions consumers make to use the Internet to gather information and to use the negotiating clout of an online buying service have a real effect on the prices paid by these consumers.

Is Open Source about innovation? How interactions with the Open Source community impact on the innovative performances of entrepreneurial ventures

Practitioners generally assert that collaboration with the Open Source software (OSS) community enables young software firms to achieve superior innovation performance. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, scholars have never extensively speculated about this assertion or rigorously tested it. In this paper, we attempt to do so. First, we root on the entrepreneurship literature and on the OSS research stream to discuss and empirically investigate whether entrepreneurial ventures collaborating with the OSS community (OSS EVs) achieve innovation performance superior to that of their non-collaborating peers. Then, we refer to the concept of absorptive capacity to determine which factors make OSS EVs better able to leverage their collaboration with the OSS community for innovation purposes. Our econometric estimates use a sample of 230 firms and indicate that OSS EVs collaborating with the OSS community achieve superior innovation. At the same time, the impact of community collaborations on innovation is stronger for EVs that are endowed with more skilled human capital, have experience with firm- OSS community collaboration, and actively contribute to the community.Entrepreneurial ventures, Open Source, firm-community collaboration, innovation performance

Stuck in the Adoption Funnel: The Effect of Interruptions in the Adoption Process on Usage

Many firms have introduced Internet-based customer self-service applications such as online payments or brokerage services. Despite high initial sign-up rates, not all customers actually shift their dealings online. We investigate whether the multistage nature of the adoption process (an “adoption funnel”) for such technologies can explain this low take-up. We use exogenous variation in events that possibly interrupt adoption, in the form of vacations and public holidays in different German states, to identify the effect on regular usage of being interrupted earlier in the adoption process. We find that interruptions in the early stages of the adoption process reduce a customer's probability of using the technology regularly. Our results suggest significant cost-saving opportunities from eliminating interruptions in the adoption funnel.NET InstituteLondon Business School. Centre for MarketingMack Center for Managing Technological InnovationDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaf

Social capital and the quality of Government : evidence from the U.S. States

Social capital - in the form of general trust and strong civi norms that call for cooperation when large-scale collective action is needed - can improve government performance in three ways: 1) It can broaden government accountability, making government responsive to citizens at large, rather than to narrow interests. 2) It can facilitate agreement where political preferences are polarized. 3) It is associated with greater innovation when policymakers face new challenges. Consistent with these arguments, Putnam (1993) has shown that regional governments in the more trusting, more civic-minded northern, and central parts of Italy provide public services more effectively than do those in the less trusting, less civic-minded southern regions. Using cross-country data, La Porta and others (1997), and Knack and Keefer (1997), obtained findings consistent with Putnam's evidence. For samples of about thirty nations (represented in the World Value Surveys), they found that societies with greater trust tended to have governments that performed significantly better. The authors used survey measures of citizen confidence in government as well as subjective indicators of bureaucratic inefficiency. The author further analyzes links between social capital and government performance, using data for the United States. In states with more social capital (as measured by an index of trust, volunteering, and census response), government performance is rated higher, based on ratings constructed by the Government Performance Project. This result is highly robust to including a variety of control variables, considering the possibility of influential outlying values, treating the performance ratings as ordinal, rather than cardinal, and correcting for possible endogeneity.National Governance,Economic Theory&Research,Poverty Assessment,Health Economics&Finance,Social Capital

Dynamics and Competition in Charitable Giving

Nowadays potential donors receive many direct mailings from many different charities, all soliciting their donations. As charities depend for a large part on their revenues from direct mail it is important to uncover the precise effects of charitable direct mailings on donating behavior. Existing studies on donating behavior generally focus on a single decision context, that is, a single donation to a single charitable cause. In reality, however, people receive many donation requests, and the responses to these requests may not be independent. In this thesis we study the dynamic and competitive effects of charitable direct mailings on donating behavior. We present two direct mailing response models, with the first focusing primarily on the competitive dimension, and the second focusing mainly on the dynamic dimension. To calibrate these models we have access to a unique dataset consisting of the databases of multiple charity organizations, providing us wi